Steal the Menu (22 page)

Shortly before nine on the morning of September 11, 2001, I leashed my dog, Duncan, and took him out for a walk in Greenwich Village. As we emerged from our gate onto Barrow Street, I looked left and right to make sure we wouldn’t collide with a runner or surprise another dog. The coast was clear, but to my left I noticed a crowd of people standing in the middle of Seventh Avenue, facing south, downtown, and staring up. I joined them.

The north tower of the World Trade Center, hooded in smoke, had, as we eventually learned, been gored by American Airlines Flight 11, which smacked into its north face just below the building’s top at 8:46 a.m. The sky, as everyone remarked, was eerily clear and blue, but even so, the second crash, of United Airlines Flight 175, into the south face of the south tower, between floors seventy-seven and eighty-five at 590 miles per hour at 9:03, although witnessed by our crowd in the street and by millions on television in real time, came from the opposite side of the towers and was easily mistaken for the exploding fuselage of the first plane.

Duncan and I went home to watch the coverage of this awfulness on television. I was shocked like everyone else that morning, of course. But since I was physically unharmed and not acquainted with any of the actual victims of the attacks, it took several months before I understood that 9/11 had had a decisive, violent effect on me. It ended my perfect life at the
Wall Street Journal
.

The
Journal
’s offices had looked directly at the Twin Towers from across West Street. Every weekday morning, when I wasn’t on vacation or traveling for work, I took the No. 1 subway to Cortlandt Street and walked through the Trade Center underground concourse to our offices in Battery Park City, the enormous office and apartment building complex erected on landfill salvaged from the excavation for the towers.

For me, the Trade Center was not just something I saw from my office. I had had a direct personal and professional interest in the original excavation for the towers and in their construction. The World Trade Center’s architect, Minoru Yamasaki, had been based in Detroit when I was growing up there. At the end of high school, I took his daughter Carol to the movies. The Yamasakis lived in a very American suburban house not designed by the architect, but he had put his stamp on the place with a traditional Japanese sand garden in the front yard. It disconcerted me on the summer night I came to pick up Carol Yamasaki, as did her grandmother, in a kimono, who thanked me at the door for being “so kind” to Carol.

So I felt kindly toward the Yamasakis, in turn, but I had not been able to avoid feeling a chill whenever I passed the brutalist towers and the inhumanly empty and cheerless space around them.

While the World Trade Center was still a construction site, I had gotten an assignment from the
New York Times Magazine
to write a piece about the revolutionary food-service system planned for the Twin Towers by the legendary restaurant impresario Joseph
Baum. Because of construction delays, I nursed that assignment for two years, hovering around the site until I could eat in the ingenious coven of intimate eateries that flowed one into another on the concourse, as well as in other more formal restaurants on higher floors, an integrated food-service network that culminated, literally, in Windows on the World, 106 floors above what eventually became Ground Zero.

My first meal of many at Windows was a preopening staff lunch, at which I interviewed the chef, who served me, as a sign of especial respect, part of the liver of a deer he’d shot over the weekend. It was raw and purple. Six Windows employees, including Baum’s acerb and brainy consultant Barbara Kafka, were watching me. I bolted the organ, still icy from the refrigerator, slice by slice, in a panic relieved only by the site of the spike of the Empire State Building’s broadcast antenna piercing the ocean of clouds three miles uptown, which blanketed everything else in Manhattan except it and us in thick fleece.

Milton Glaser, the eminent graphic designer who had collaborated on Baum’s complex project, had copied the sky around us on a brighter day for the ceiling of a restaurant on the seventy-eighth floor, where there was a barber I went to for the view over the Hudson from his chair.

I did not make it to lunch in the towers on February 26, 1993, the occasion of the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. As lunchtime drew near, in order to pass the time until guests from Santa Fe arrived, I was listening on earphones to a recording of the original version of Arnold Schoenberg’s
Verklärte Nacht
, which was written for string sextet, when, at 12:18 p.m., a boom blasted through the music. My first thought was: This piece is not scored for tympani. Then I looked out the window at my right elbow: smoke was pouring out of a ventilation baffle in the street nine floors below. Islamist terrorists had exploded a 1,200-pound
bomb in a Ryder rental van parked in the underground garage of the Trade Center. Six people were killed. Smoke filled the towers, and fifty thousand were evacuated.

My intrepid New Mexican friends had been moving upward on an escalator to a covered bridge spanning West Street when the explosion hit and knocked out power to the escalator. After pausing for only a moment, they walked up the stalled stairway and continued on to my office. We ate in a little place on the water in the World Financial Center. I’ve forgotten its name and menu, but not the TV monitors over the bar, which dropped their usual fare of stock market news for coverage of the disaster across the street. Survivors, their faces black from smoke, trickled in steadily. With each arrival, applause broke out and we, the unharmed, bought them drinks.

After 9/11, the
Journal
opened offices for its staff in temporary locations all over Manhattan. Our least fortunate colleagues were exiled to the company’s sprawling and cheerless complex in South Brunswick, New Jersey. Our page moved with the neocon editorialists and the Weekend section to a loft space in the garment center. I would never return as a staffer to 200 Liberty Street after the building was decontaminated and rehabbed, many months later. My job was eliminated in a brutal budget cut that did not stem the accelerating decline of the
Journal
’s fortunes, until its sale to Rupert Murdoch in 2007.

Getting forcibly “retired” in May 2002 did not surprise me. Even before 9/11, I had foreseen the future. In the spring of 2001, virtually every journalist over sixty on the paper, the core of its institutional memory, took early retirement. Then came a redesign and a restructuring, which reduced the presence of the Leisure and Arts page (“my” page) in the
Journal
from five days to three. We did pick up space in Weekend, but it wasn’t really
ours
, in name or spirit, and our location on other days had been shifted from a key
spot in the A section to the new fourth section, Personal Journal, a catchall of personal finance advice and soft news.

My job had shrunk in scope almost by half. Either someone was going to figure it out and fire me or I’d be twiddling my thumbs at my desk. One way or the other, I was going to need something to fill the slack time. I signed a contract with Susan Friedland at HarperCollins for a compendium of 101 recipes every literate cook should know (I asserted), which appeared in 2003 as
The Cook’s Canon
. I also arranged to re-up as a classics graduate student at Harvard in order to finish my long-abandoned PhD.

It wasn’t as though I had been brooding guiltily about that unfinished dissertation ever since I had forsaken classics for the Paris bureau of
Newsweek
in 1965. But I had never been able to cut the cord completely. From time to time, I would reread a book of Homer or Vergil (Book IV of
The Aeneid
for the Vergil bimillennium in 1970), and I couldn’t bring myself to toss out the notes for my thesis on rare Homeric vocabulary in Theocritus, hundreds of three-by-five cards in a hinged maple box.

Then one night in early 2001 I ran into John Van Sickle, a Harvard classicist who had fetched up at the City University of New York. He handed me an offprint of his latest article on Vergil. I read it and noticed that the footnotes were full of references to lively-sounding recent work on the sources for Vergil’s Eclogues, short pastoral poems modeled after Greek poetry of third-century
B.C.
Alexandria.

I mentioned this to John and observed that my notes for a thesis on Theocritus, the leading poet of the proto-Vergilians in his article, had survived the years in my attic.

“Why not give them to me?” he asked.

If this had been a scene in a comic book, a lightbulb would have gone on over my head. I thought: If a distinguished senior scholar
like him is interested in them, maybe I should consider using them myself.

I checked. Even after thirty-five years and a boomlet in Hellenistic studies, no one had stumbled onto my thesis idea. Way back then, I’d noticed how Theocritus worked stunningly unusual Homeric vocabulary into his Idylls, which were very un-Homeric short poems about lovesick shepherds or other highly unepic, unheroic material. Those rare Homeric words stuck out like drawn swords at a tryst in a sheepfold.

An ancient reader from Theocritus’s circle of scholar-poets at the Alexandrian library could not have missed these Homeric nonce words. Hellenistic literati knew
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
by heart. So when they saw a word Homer had used only once in a contemporary poem, they would have automatically connected it with its original location in Homer. Just as automatically, they would have compared the two contexts in their minds, the original and the Theocritean. The pinpoint verbal link would have spotlit the contrast between Homer’s bloody heroic universe and the soft, love-besotted pleasant retreats of Theocritus’s bucolic brave new world.

I called the Harvard classics department to find out if my graduate work from the sixties was still valid toward the PhD. The secretary had no idea and referred me to the university registrar, who showed no surprise at all to be discussing readmission with a man who’d dropped out thirty-seven years before. They sent me a green, single-page form. I sent it back. There were three other requirements.

First, I owed the richest learned institution in the world a $150 “reactivation fee” for every term for which I had not registered. This would have amounted to $11,100 for the seventy-four terms I’d been AWOL, but there was a cap of $1,000. That I could afford.

Second, I had to submit an official copy of my graduate school transcript bearing the seal of the university. To accomplish this, I sent a $3 check by snail mail to Harvard’s archival division, which sent me back the transcript, also by snail mail. I then put the transcript in another envelope and mailed it back to Cambridge, to another university office a short walk from the place that had issued the transcript. So much for the information highway.

Finally, and most challenging, I needed a letter of recommendation from a member of the department. Every professor I had known was dead, except for one. Wendell V. Clausen, my original thesis advisor, was seventy-eight and, though retired from a very eminent career as a Latinist and student of Hellenistic poetry, he was also emeritus and therefore technically still a member of the department.

He wrote the letter. I was readmitted, earlier than I had expected. But I had to finish work on
The Cook’s Canon
before I could start on the dissertation. So I spent a year researching 101 classic recipes I thought should be part of everyone’s culinary background, before I dived into reading all the scholarship on Hellenistic poetry that had come out since my flight from antiquity in 1967.

Then I wrote the thesis,
^*
without any of the career anxiety that had made me leap to the safety of
Newsweek
in 1965. And I got the doctorate in 2005—June 9, to be exact. I even attended commencement in the Harvard Yard and sat in the front section once again (the right side, reserved for PhD’s, instead of the left, for undergraduates, where I had once shared the front row with the other AB summas), close enough to see porky Harvard president Larry Summers peer with half-shut beady eyes out on the thousands of students and their guests. Henry Louis Gates was up on
the dais, too. I’d seen him the week before at Columbia University, at the awards ceremony for the Pulitzer Prizes. “My” film critic at the
Journal
, Joe Morgenstern, had won the prize for criticism, the only Pulitzer “my” page had won in two decades. Nothing, apparently, became my career at the
Journal
so much as my leaving it.

You may be wondering why I didn’t take my shiny new degree and find a job on some leafy campus teaching the young about the aorist optative or the joy of Sextus Empiricus.
^†
Well, I really wasn’t interested in teaching anywhere but Harvard, and Harvard wouldn’t have me. I asked Richard Thomas, the head of the department, who had been on my dissertation committee, if I should apply for a job I’d learned about in an ad in the
Times Literary Supplement
of London. The minimum requirement was a dissertation in progress, and I already had the degree. Richard replied, “We’re looking for someone for the long haul.”